more questions about bricks and walls and tiling...

oraeles77

I posted this question a few days ago...

https://polycount.com/discussion/202823/discussion-if-you-were-asked-to-make-a-small-brick-wall-what-would-be-your-workflow

so im a bit lost, Im trying to make a generic wall, but then use these skills later on to make some normal looking buildings, but I want to move away from my previous experience of Sketchup users who say 'ohh just apply any old brick texture and thats fine', for example when I made that wall above, I didnt measure anything accurately so there were so odd gaps in certain places, this time I thought I'd measure the brick correctly so the placement would be correct. however Im still split between making a 512x tiled texture, or making a high poly for an entire wall and baking it and then knowing I can get corners with the right damaged/scratched look as well as dirt/grunge which has variation from top to bottom etc.

all advice is welcome cause Im sort of conused on this.

ZacD

1.  Yes, something that should be using a tiling texture like a brick wall probably shouldn't have a uniquely baked normal map.

2. For anything boxy, I would custom weight the normals on the front, back, sides, etc, so there wouldn't be a any normal map gradients, helps with compression, comparability, artifacts, MIP maps, etc. 

You have 3 good options, bake a tiling texture that can be reused for any wall, generate a brick texture in substance, or use an existing photo/premade texture.

What I'd personally suggest is modifying an existing substance to get the scale you want. 

gnoop

In my experience the easiest and quickest way to do this is by going outside at a cloudy day and took 10-20 hires pictures for photogrammetry, enough for say 20 mil poly surface reconstruction in Reality Capture.     Those brick walls are everywhere.  Literally a few steps outside.
  Substance Designer is not especially great for changing the scale of details. Once you re-scale something it's no more looking same realistic unless you spent a day tweaking and tweaking non-stop through the whole graph and in the end  the real thing vs SD  is still looking more real if put next to each other.     SD is still  good to ad a few extra variety on top of the scanned thing.

oraeles77

ZacD said:

1.  Yes, something that should be using a tiling texture like a brick wall probably shouldn't have a uniquely baked normal map.

2. For anything boxy, I would custom weight the normals on the front, back, sides, etc, so there wouldn't be a any normal map gradients, helps with compression, comparability, artifacts, MIP maps, etc. 

You have 3 good options, bake a tiling texture that can be reused for any wall, generate a brick texture in substance, or use an existing photo/premade texture.

What I'd personally suggest is modifying an existing substance to get the scale you want. 

the trouble with modifying an existing substacne is that I've had trouble creating a brick texture which has the correct height/length size ratio.

oraeles77

gnoop said:

 hires pictures

whats a hire picture? sorry!

oraeles77

gnoop said:

In my experience the easiest and quickest way to do this is by going outside at a cloudy day and took 10-20 hires pictures for photogrammetry, enough for say 20 mil poly surface reconstruction in Reality Capture.     Those brick walls are everywhere.  Literally a few steps outside.
  Substance Designer is not especially great for changing the scale of details. Once you re-scale something it's no more looking same realistic unless you spent a day tweaking and tweaking non-stop through the whole graph and in the end  the real thing vs SD  is still looking more real if put next to each other.     SD is still  good to ad a few extra variety on top of the scanned thing.

https://www.capturingreality.com/Product#Download

Try for Free

• You cannot export meshes, ortho-projections and registered camera poses.

ohh thats a shame!

oraeles77

ZacD said:

2. For anything boxy, I would custom weight the normals on the front, back, sides, etc, so there wouldn't be a any normal map gradients, helps with compression, comparability, artifacts, MIP maps, etc. 

i've never heard of custom weighting normals. could you explain it a bit? I assume it means when you bake a normal and there is a gradient from the top to the bottom of the normal map and sometimes its a single uniform colour.

Alex_J

Google, man!

You'll find the answers more quickly, and they'll be more thorough. Forums can be a lifesaver, but it is certainly the slowest way to get an answer.

Questions like : "what is x?" = google.

Questions like : "i've tried face weighting my normals but on export I have some strange results. What to do?" = forum

musashidan

oraeles77 said:

gnoop said:

 hires pictures

whats a hire picture? sorry!

High resolution photograph.

oraeles77

musashidan said:

oraeles77 said:

gnoop said:

 hires pictures

whats a hire picture? sorry!

High resolution photograph.

ok, understood!

oraeles77

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

Google, man!

You'll find the answers more quickly, and they'll be more thorough. Forums can be a lifesaver, but it is certainly the slowest way to get an answer.

Questions like : "what is x?" = google.

Questions like : "i've tried face weighting my normals but on export I have some strange results. What to do?" = forum

yeah, sorry if i come across as lazy, i did check the wiki etc, but what it means doesnt make any sense.

Face weighted normals

Face weighted normals (FWN) is a technique to improve shading for 3d models. Shading can be improved by adding bevels and altering the vertex normals to be perpendicular on the larger flat polygons. This forces the shading to be blended across the smaller bevel faces, rather than across the entire model.

Alex_J

It makes sense. The question is why can you not make sense from it?

Assume you are ignorant, not that everybody else is a fool. 

Face weighted normals is an advanced topic, and you are a closer to a begiinner. Of course it will be hard to understand. But do more research. There's a lot more in depth knowledge written about the subject you can find, if it interest you. Learning takes time!

musashidan

Here's a video from my Youtube channel explaining FWVN in very simple terms. Also you can read through @obscura's thread here on the forums(which I point to in the video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kizs6RIa1dQ&t=243s

oraeles77

musashidan said:

Here's a video from my Youtube channel explaining FWVN in very simple terms. Also you can read through @obscura's thread here on the forums(which I point to in the video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kizs6RIa1dQ&t=243s

thank you!

oraeles77

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

It makes sense. The question is why can you not make sense from it?

Assume you are ignorant, not that everybody else is a fool. 

Face weighted normals is an advanced topic, and you are a closer to a begiinner. Of course it will be hard to understand. But do more research. There's a lot more in depth knowledge written about the subject you can find, if it interest you. Learning takes time!

if I was ignorant I wouldnt even ask questions about it would I?

Alex_J

That's not what ignorant means. It's not an insult. Ignorant just means you haven't learned something yet. So if we say that a person who is saying racist things is ignorant, we are saying that they clearly have not had enough experience to know that  such a worldview is harmful, useless, and nonsensical. You don't say the racist person is stupid, or an idiot, because that's probably not true, and throwing insults is no way to change a persons mind. So that's why I use the word ignorant, it just means you haven't learned about the subject in question yet -- not that you are dumb or anything of the sort. Fact is, you are likely much smarter than me -- I kind of assume most people around here are as I have a very hard time understanding a lot of technical details. But that doesn't mean you cannot be more ignorant about some subjects than I am, and vice versa.

 The point was, assume that you just don't know enough to understand the thing, not that it is written bad or wrong. Remember, the people who write these things are just like you will be 5-10 years from now. They don't get paid to put all the info out there, they do it just to help. 

Could very well be that bad info is out there -- not saying there isn't. But when you don't know the difference, you've got to assume for awhile that there's jsut a lot you don't know that you'll need to learn piece by piece. It can be frustrating, but resist the urge to blame the learning content -- don't bite the hand which feeds you!

*** extra : mushashidans youtube is great. really easy to digest, straight to the point stuff. I tihnk I've watched most of their content, assuming I'm connecting the correct names.

oraeles77

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

That's not what ignorant means. It's not an insult. Ignorant just means you haven't learned something yet. So if we say that a person who is saying racist things is ignorant, we are saying that they clearly have not had enough experience to know that  such a worldview is harmful, useless, and nonsensical. You don't say the racist person is stupid, or an idiot, because that's probably not true, and throwing insults is no way to change a persons mind. So that's why I use the word ignorant, it just means you haven't learned about the subject in question yet -- not that you are dumb or anything of the sort. Fact is, you are likely much smarter than me -- I kind of assume most people around here are as I have a very hard time understanding a lot of technical details. But that doesn't mean you cannot be more ignorant about some subjects than I am, and vice versa.

 The point was, assume that you just don't know enough to understand the thing, not that it is written bad or wrong. Remember, the people who write these things are just like you will be 5-10 years from now. They don't get paid to put all the info out there, they do it just to help. 

Could very well be that bad info is out there -- not saying there isn't. But when you don't know the difference, you've got to assume for awhile that there's jsut a lot you don't know that you'll need to learn piece by piece. It can be frustrating, but resist the urge to blame the learning content -- don't bite the hand which feeds you!

*** extra : mushashidans youtube is great. really easy to digest, straight to the point stuff. I tihnk I've watched most of their content, assuming I'm connecting the correct names.

lets not get into long paragraphs about word definitions, but seriously if you use that word as an adjective towards someone it is considered pejorative.

change of topic,  I saw those images of those medieval characters you made on your art station, do you have any more images of them? they look damn cool.

Alex_J

I agree that there's no point getting into lengthy semantics. I just wanted to caution against the bad habit of blaming things outside ones control (the learning content) instead of focusing and working with what you've got. It's something you see a lot, beginners complaining there isn't enough free, comprehensive content available to them, or that its out of date, etc etc. I don't know you personally, but some of your word choices reflected that common mindset to some degree. No disrespect intended. If I misjudged and it doesn't apply, don't mind me. 

Thanks for the kind words about the characters. Really glad to get some positive feedback from a fellow artist. A few test gamers have enjoyed them, but I haven't got any feedback from artist yet so that's nice. I do have tons of images of them, but they are still in development and will continue to grow and change. The game they are being developed for should be ready for some gameplay demo videos in another week or two (programmer isn't pleased with some ragdolls flying to the moon, haha), so just keep an eye on my thread in the 3d showcase (here) if you want to see more of them, and if you are curious about any of the processes I used to create them, feel free to ask there. It has been a major learning process for me so far, so I'm happy to share what I've learned, good or bad, along the way.

musashidan

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

*** extra : mushashidans youtube is great. really easy to digest, straight to the point stuff. I tihnk I've watched most of their content, assuming I'm connecting the correct names.

Thanks. And 'their' is just me.

ant1fact

musashidan said:

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

*** extra : mushashidans youtube is great. really easy to digest, straight to the point stuff. I tihnk I've watched most of their content, assuming I'm connecting the correct names.

Thanks. And 'their' is just me.

I think 'their' was used like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

*EDIT* of course you would have to be a girl with a very deep voice for that to be true!

oraeles77

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

I agree that there's no point getting into lengthy semantics. I just wanted to caution against the bad habit of blaming things outside ones control (the learning content) instead of focusing and working with what you've got. It's something you see a lot, beginners complaining there isn't enough free, comprehensive content available to them, or that its out of date, etc etc. I don't know you personally, but some of your word choices reflected that common mindset to some degree. No disrespect intended. If I misjudged and it doesn't apply, don't mind me. 

Thanks for the kind words about the characters. Really glad to get some positive feedback from a fellow artist. A few test gamers have enjoyed them, but I haven't got any feedback from artist yet so that's nice. I do have tons of images of them, but they are still in development and will continue to grow and change. The game they are being developed for should be ready for some gameplay demo videos in another week or two (programmer isn't pleased with some ragdolls flying to the moon, haha), so just keep an eye on my thread in the 3d showcase (here) if you want to see more of them, and if you are curious about any of the processes I used to create them, feel free to ask there. It has been a major learning process for me so far, so I'm happy to share what I've learned, good or bad, along the way.

on your blog, it says 'i've been doing this since november 2017' does that mean you started the project last year or all of your training is from last year?